AMD has just announced GPUOpen which is their answer to NVIDIA’s GameWorks. NVIDIA’s GameWorks SDK helps developers speed up PC graphics and provide a more interactive and cinematic game experience for users on NVIDIA hardware. AMD does not want NVIDIA to be the only one offering these tools to developers so they are announcing GPUOpen with the “open” referring to “open-source”.

GPUOpen much like GameWorks is a set of pre-developed visual effects, tools, libraries, and SDKs. These will give developers “unprecedented control” over the GPU, helping their software get closer to the metal than any other software can. This means that titles that make use of NVIDIA GameWorks will not get you as “close” to the metal on PCs with Radeon GPUs as well as consoles like Xbox One and PlayStation 4. What we mean by “getting close to the metal” is having a few software layers between the app and the hardware as possible.

AMD plans to have GPUOpen resources on GitHub as early as January 2016 with its very own portal. This will give developers access to the open-source content to use on their own projects.